Chris Sampson’s journal round-up for 15th October 2018

Every Monday our authors provide a round-up of some of the most recently published peer reviewed articles from the field. We don’t cover everything, or even what’s most important – just a few papers that have interested the author. Visit our Resources page for links to more journals or follow the HealthEconBot. If you’d like to write one of our weekly journal round-ups, get in touch.

In vitro fertilisation (IVF) is a challenge for standard models of valuation in health economics. Mostly, that’s because, despite it falling within the scope of health care, and despite infertility being a health problem, many of the benefits of IVF can’t be considered health-specific. QALYs can’t really do the job, so there’s arguably a role for cost-benefit analysis, and for using stated preference methods to determine the value of IVF. This study adds to an existing literature studying willingness to pay for IVF, but differs in that it tries to identify willingness to pay (WTP) from the general population. This study is set in Australia, where IVF is part-funded by universal health insurance, so asking the public is arguably the right thing to do.

Three contingent valuation surveys were conducted online with 1,870 people from the general public. The first survey used a starting point bid of $10,000, and then, 10 months later, two more surveys were conducted with starting point bids of $4,000 and $10,000. Each included questions for a 10%, 20%, and 50% success rate. Respondents were asked to adopt an ex-post perspective, assuming that they were infertile and could conceive by IVF. Individuals could respond to starting bids with ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘not sure’, or ‘I am not willing to pay anything’. WTP for one IVF cycle with a 20% success rate ranged from $6,353 in the $4,000 survey to $11,750 in the first $10,000 survey. WTP for a year of treatment ranged from $18,433 to $28,117. The method was reliable insofar as there were no differences between the first and second $10,000 surveys. WTP values corresponded to the probability of success, providing support for the internal construct validity of the survey. However, the big difference between values derived using the alternative starting point bids indicates a strong anchoring bias. The authors also tested the external criterion validity by comparing the number of respondents willing to pay more than $4,000 for a cycle with a 20% success rate (roughly equivalent to the out of pocket cost in Australia) with the number of people who actually choose to pay for IVF in Australia. Around 63% of respondents were willing to pay at that price, which is close to the estimated 60% in Australia.

This study provides some support for the use of contingent valuation methods in the context of IVF, and for its use in general population samples. But the anchoring effect is worrying and justifies further research to identify appropriate methods to counteract this bias. The exclusion of the “not sure” and “I will not pay anything” responses from the analysis – as ‘non-demanders’ – arguably undermines the ‘societal valuation’ aspect of the estimates.

The question of how governments determine spending on medicines is pertinent in the UK right now, as the Pharmaceutical Price Regulation Scheme approaches its renewal date. The current agreement includes a cap on pharmaceutical expenditure. It should go without saying that GDP ought to have some influence on how much public spending is dedicated to medicines. But, when medicines expenditure might also influence GDP, the actual relationship is difficult to estimate. In this paper, the authors seek to identify both effects: the income elasticity of government spending on pharmaceuticals and the effect of that spending on income.

The authors use a variety of data sources from the World Health Organization, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund to construct an unbalanced panel for 136 countries from 1995 to 2006. To get around the challenge of two-way causality, the authors implement a two-step instrumental variable approach. In the first step of the procedure, a model estimates the impact of GDP per capita on government spending on pharmaceuticals. International tourist receipts are used as an instrument that is expected to correlate strongly with GDP per capita, but which is expected to be unrelated to medicines expenditure (except through its correlation with GDP). The model attempts to control for health care expenditure, life expectancy, and other important country-specific variables. In the second step, a reverse causality model is used to assess the impact of pharmaceutical expenditure on GDP per capita, with pharmaceutical expenditure adjusted to partial-out the response to GDP estimated in the first step.

The headline average results are that GDP increases pharmaceutical expenditure and that pharmaceutical expenditure reduces GDP. A 1% increase in GDP per capita increases public pharmaceutical expenditure per capita by 1.4%, suggesting that pharmaceuticals are a luxury good. A 1% increase in public pharmaceutical expenditure is associated with a 0.09% decrease in GDP per capita. But the results are more nuanced than that. The authors outline various sources of heterogeneity. The positive effect of GDP on pharmaceutical expenditure only holds for high-income countries and the negative effect of pharmaceutical expenditure on GDP only holds for low-income countries. Quantile regressions show that income elasticity decreases for higher quantiles of expenditure. GDP only influences pharmaceutical spending in countries classified as ‘free’ on the index of Economic Freedom of the World, and pharmaceutical expenditure only has a negative impact on GDP in countries that are ‘not free’.

I’ve never come across this kind of two-step approach before, so I’m still trying to get my head around whether the methods and the data are adequate. But a series of robustness checks provide some reassurance. In particular, an analysis of intertemporal effects using lagged GDP and lagged pharmaceutical expenditure demonstrates the robustness of the main findings. Arguably, the findings of this study are more important for policymaking in low- and middle-income countries, where pharmaceutical expenditures might have important consequences for GDP. In high-income (and ‘free’) economies that spend a lot on medicines, like the UK, there is probably less at stake. This could be because of effective price regulation and monitoring, and better adherence, ensuring that pharmaceutical expenditure is not wasteful.

Any intervention has the potential for spillover effects, whereby people other than the recipient of care are positively or negatively affected by the consequences of the intervention. Where a child is the recipient of care, it stands to reason that any intervention could affect the well-being of the parents and that these impacts should be considered in economic evaluation. But how should parental spillovers be incorporated? Are parental utilities additive to that of the child patient? Or should a multiplier effect be used with reference to the effect of an intervention on the child’s utility?

The study reports on a trial-based economic evaluation of family therapy for self-harming adolescents aged 11-17. Data collection included EQ-5D-3L for the adolescents and HUI2 for the main caregiver (86% mothers) at baseline, 6-month follow-up, and 12-month follow-up, collected from 731 patient-parent pairs. The authors outline six alternative methods for including parental health spillovers: i) relative health spillover, ii) relative health spillover per treatment arm, iii) absolute health spillover, iv) absolute global health spillover per treatment arm, v) additive accrued health benefits, and vi) household equivalence scales. These differ according to whether parental utility is counted as depending on adolescent’s utility, treatment allocation, the primary outcome of the study, or some combination thereof. But the authors’ primary focus (and the main contribution of this study) is the equivalence scale option. This involves adding together the spillover effects for other members of the household and using alternative weightings depending on the importance of parental utility compared with adolescent utility.

Using Tobit models, controlling for a variety of factors, the authors demonstrate that parental utility is associated with adolescent utility. Then, economic evaluations are conducted using each of the alternative spillover accounting methods. The base case of including only adolescents’ utility delivers an ICER of around £40,453. Employing the alternative methods gives quite different results, with the intervention dominated in two of the cases and an ICER below £30,000 per QALY in others. For the equivalence scale approach, the authors employ several elasticities for spillover utility, ranging from 0 (where parental utility is of equivalent value to adolescent utility and therefore additive) to 1 (where the average health spillover per household member is estimated for each patient). The ICER estimates using the equivalence scale approach ranged from £27,166 to £32,504. Higher elasticity implied lower cumulated QALYs.

The paper’s contribution is methodological, and I wouldn’t read too much into the magnitude of the results. For starters, the use of HUI2 (a measure for children) in adults and the use of EQ-5D-3L (a measure for adults) in the children is somewhat confusing. The authors argue that health gains should only be aggregated at the household level if the QALY gain for the patient is greater or equal to zero, because the purpose of treatment is to benefit the adolescents, not the parents. And they argue in favour of using an equivalence scale approach. By requiring an explicit judgement to set the elasticity within the estimation, the method provides a useful and transparent approach to including parental spillovers.